Heaven Alive

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played : 7/15/25
Playtime: 5m, three playthroughs

Another in my review sub-series "Penny Pinching Parity," where I attempt to match review wordcount to IF Jam limits! In this case, the count in question is 498.

This is a two-hander, a dialogue based lightly sci-fi game of living with mismatched power. It is a relatively short game of trying to influence a mercurial lord to engage a rescue mission, when said lord is more preoccupied with their own inter-personal potence. It doesn’t take many viewings of Game of Thrones to understand the dread of this scenario, of LIVING it. Ultimately, you choose between (Spoiler - click to show)self-respect and (Spoiler - click to show)physical abuse.

I think this dynamic is pretty well understood (if quite timely), and deeply unpleasant. This familiarity could undermine impact pretty quickly. So much so that having it be the entirety of the work’s artistic aims presents a challenge to the author. The solution? Make the game short. A distilled, heightened representation, that has its say and lets you stew in the aftermath before you fully realize it is done. This is the perfect way to realize this message.

If I had a quibble with the game, it was in its multimedia choices. Not all of them. For example, the “Approval” score being the only game stat was a kind of genius way of underlining how primarily important this lord’s opinion was in the scheme of things. There is no “happiness” score, no other score AT ALL. Similarly, the sound choice was nicely evocative of the mood of the piece - omnipresent dread, even behind seemingly transactional conversations. Highlighting that the content of the words is only half the story.

Its visual presentation is what I find less focused. To my eyes, there is just a bit too much going on, in a way that doesn’t coalesce together. The background conveys “generic sci fi background” where its sci-fi-ness is the least necessary thing about the work. The bar coding is a very powerful choice, emphasizing the property aspect of the characters… except the lord ALSO has a barcode? That feels like a mixed message for this particular work. The title screen also feels unfocused: its logo and title fonts feel like too many disparate graphical elements that don’t resonate with each other. “Heaven” is one sci-fi font, “Alive” a more organic one, and the barcoding a third, only the latter resonating with the background in any meaningful way. Graphical dissonance is not a BAD impulse, but to my eye, this feels like one too many. I might suggest recasting “Heaven” to more align with the barcoding, to maximize the visceral punch of the “Alive” choice.

Don’t let these quibbles get you down though. As we have established, brevity and focus, even imperfectly realized, are overriding virtues. Don’t make me COMMAND you to play it… that might undermine your APPROVAL stat… and nobody wants that…

Feeling word-parity smug. Exactly 498!